New Norm. So much talk of that. Yet the world of supply chain logistics it would appear is in flux.

There are currently unrivalled seemingly overlapping disruptions affecting just about every area of supply chain across all sectors. From the pandemic to isolated covid outbreaks, major port closures, the pingdemic, ongoing Suez fall-out, displaced containers, throttled capacity, inflation, fuel shortages, HGV driver shortages, Brexit, skilled labour, and materials shortages, I could go on…

The upward disruption curve, which existed long before the pandemic, has been well documented; with McKinsey & Co forecasting that in as little as a decade, companies could well experience losing as much as half their annual EBITDA to global disruption. So, the phenomenon is not new. What is new? The patterns of the past are not being repeated. The level of disruption, seemingly all happening at once, that’s all new.

In the past, in the old norm, disruptions to supply chain such as natural disasters, political disturbance, trade wars, even regional epidemics, were invariably acknowledged to be acute short term events, where even heavily affected services were always expected to return to the status quo.

But these are seismic shifts. And often with seismic shifts, the landscape changes permanently.